Don Pendleton's Science Fiction Collection, 3 Books Box Set, (The Guns of Terra 10; The Godmakers; The Olympians)

by Don Pendleton

  The President had smiled grimly, almost sadly, and observed, “Yes, I’m sure that’s true if you say so. Still, it seems that most of the miseries of this old world have been produced by sexual immorality and licentiousness.”

  “But sex is basically pure, not immoral,” Clinton pointed out. “You have the report I gave you on Curt Wenssler. Remember Honor’s suggestion that Wenssler’s personality was trapped between his thalamus and limbic system?”

  “Yes, and subsequent treatment seems to have validated that suggestion,” Wilkins had replied. “But what’s the point?”

  “Mankind as a whole, like Wenssler as an individual, is imprisoned in carnal error. It’s a trap, just like Wenssler’s. Mankind is trapped in the interactions of the mass libido.”

  “Am I supposed to understand that?” Wilkins had asked, rather testily.

  “Yes, if you want to go with us, I guess it’s absolutely mandatory that you understand it, sir. Honor won’t have it any other way.”

  “Then you’d better explain the dimensions of this libidinal trap,” the President responded.

  Barbara took it from there. “It’s the pull between sin and ecstasy, guilt and fulfillment, vulgarity and beauty, and all the other opposites on the two sides of sex. Many couples, lying together in bed, are using other expressions and calling them sex. Such as hate, fear, greed, vanity—you name it, it’s all in there in the sexual bed. Gross error compounded. Everything but the truth of it all: beauty and freedom.”

  “Freedom, as we say, is the end-truth of sex, sir,” Clinton added.

  “The carnal truth that sets men free, eh?” the President mused. He arose, went to his bedroom door, turned a slightly embarrassed gaze toward Barbara, and said, “Miss Thompson?” He opened the door and ushered her in.

  She softly told him, “Under the circumstances, I’d be more comfortable if we could be less formal.”

  “Of course.” He stood indecisively in the center of the bedroom, staring at her.

  Barbara removed her dress and draped it across a chair. She smiled at him and said, “I love all mankind through my Godmaker, Honorkir.”

  “Yes, I can believe that,” the President murmured.

  She had stripped to the buff and was helping him to do the same. She moved into his arms and sighed. “You are beautiful, Jack. You must love me as I love you.”

  “Yes,” he said shakily, “I believe I do that.”

  Moments later, the space where Presidents had lain for nearly two centimes was vibrating to the song of freedom.

  “I’ll wager a lot of graves are being spun in this night,” Wilkins observed in one of his last objective moments.

  “Forget that,” Barbara moaned. “You’re in my body, now get into my mind. In, Jack, in!”

  “Good lord!” he cried. “What was that?”

  “That’s the way you make me feel! See? Oh! Oh yes, darling, that’s it, that’s it. Give yourself! All! All of you to all of me! Yes! Yes! Oh darling, oh darl—”

  Honor’s urgent cry shrieked into her swirling consciousness, Barbara, stop! Don’t go! It’s a trap!

  But the warning came too late. She was committed to the journey and there was no pulling back. Wilkins’ mind was wrapped in hers and they were drifting through infinity. A strange infinity. A hostile and a frightening one.

  “Good God, where are we?” Milt Clinton cried. Dorothy screamed, “Something is crawling on me! “

  “Think of Pat!” Barbara called to them. “Don’t for one moment lose consciousness with Pat!”

  Back in the White House, Patrick Honor was frantically searching for a warped geometer. A group of men in weird red uniforms ran past him, carrying flaming torches. They showed him no attention whatever, as though he did not exist. Suddenly he knew who they were and what they were doing.

  “God’s sake!” he yelled to nobody at all. “It’s the British! They’re burning the White House!” He ran to find the warp they’d entered from.

  4: Masters of Geometry

  In a flash of understanding, Honor knew the circumstances. The Rogue, damn him, was rapidly growing into an understanding of his own power and was beginning to reason geometrically. Honor could understand, quite easily, an occasional error-image, or “ghost”, drifting through the material field. This could be explained under the Law of Chaos and Infinite Chance. But he should have realized the implications of a horde of discarnate images collecting in one place and all seemingly bent toward a specific goal. He should have known ... he had, of course, “known” that something was out of kilter. It was why he had taken the stroll across the lawn; why he had crushed, smelled, and tasted the blossom; why he had studied so intently the geometric properties of the ancient structure. Yes, he had “known,” but too vaguely and he blamed the Rogue for that, also.

  The Rogue was manipulating the geometric field, this much was now obvious. How absolute, Honor wondered, were the physical laws? Not at all, he realized quickly. The projections from each individual geometer were easily malleable by the receiving medium. The Rogue had been that medium, almost from the beginning. The same laws that had created the medium had created also the Rogue; inherent free will was his birthright, and the birthright of every material body. The Rogue had co-existed with material free will, the Law of Chaos, because it had been the law of his being and had served his purposes. But now, knowing itself, the Rogue could manipulate those laws almost at will. Almost. He could not replace the White House geometer; he could but set up a harmonic and, being the Rogue, the devolver, naturally he would select a time harmonic—past time.

  Honor was still blaming himself for not realizing the truth sooner. He could have aborted that projection to the other side if he had only understood the phase- constant difference between the plants outside the White House and the geometric atmosphere of the structure itself. Joint evolution had been “out of step”—mis-phased—and only his subconscious had grasped the implications of that unnatural circumstance. The Rogue had thrown him off the track, of course, diverted him with howling banshees and malevolent molecules.

  Honor had found the location of the geometric warp. He directed his consciousness into the void of displacement between the two parallaxes and raised his astral arms to full length above his head. Hadrin, he prayed, show me the way!

  He was abruptly jarred and flung into a counterclockwise spiral, narrow and twisting. He recognized it instantly as a barrel-parallax, and he knew where he was headed. “Beyond the mirror!" he cried, torn suddenly by the cruel knowledge of a complete and utter separation from the True God.

  “This is incredible!” Jack Wilkins groaned. “I’m in agony. What went wrong?”

  “Pat tried to stop us at the last instant,” Barbara explained in a pained voice. She was working hard to maintain self-control. “I’m afraid that the Rogue has outsmarted us.”

  “It’s like . . . hell!" Wilkins complained.

  “It is hell,” Milt Clinton declared, adding his tortured voice to the conversation. “I get the feeling that Pat will get us out,” Barbara assured them. “He knows what has happened to us. Keep your fields open to his influence. He will find us.”

  “I hope he hurries!” Dorothy half screamed. “These awful things are . . . what are these awful things?”

  Wilkins groaned and said, “Maybe we’ve been wrong.”

  “Don’t!” Barbara warned sharply. “Don’t even think like that. We must cling to truth!”

  “It’s hell, it’s hell,” Wilkins moaned. “It’s tearing at me. This is what happened to Wenssler, isn’t it? . This is . . .”

  “Swirl together,” ordered a familiar voice. “Hurry! Join up!”

  “Pat!” Barbara cried.

  “I said hurry! Let’s geometrize! Come on Milt, Dotty. Swirl, dammit!”

  Five alien entities in an incredibly unhappy land came together, swirled, and crystallized into a geometric pattern. “Five planes,” Honor ordered, “symmetrize ... I said symmetrize . . . that’s good . . . yes
, that’s better. Hold it just like this, now, and they can’t enter us. Feel better now?”

  A chorus of relieved responses rippled across the pentagon.

  “Good,” Honor said. “Cool down, now, and let’s figure a way out of this mess.”

  “Where in the name of God are we?” came from Clinton’s pentagonal plane.

  “In the name of God, nowhere,” Honor replied. “I believe that we are in the collective unconscious.”

  Wilkins groaned. “Jung should be here to see it,” he said.

  “And feel it,” Dorothy added with a shiver. “What are those things, Pat?”

  “Thought forms,” he immediately replied. “Thoughts are things, you know. There . . . feel that one? That was a murder instinct that just glanced off of us.”

  “It’s terrible, terrible,” Wilkins said.

  “We’re in the low spectrum, the best I can figure,” Honor told them. “This is the collection of errors in eternal mind. Now look . . . there’s a trade-off between this universe and the world of matter. We’ve got to figure out how it works, and quick. The Rogue is burning the White House. We must get back to the bodies before they’re destroyed.”

  “God almighty!” Wilkins cried. His side of the pentagon wobbled erratically and a strong surge of pain entered the formation before he could firm it up again.

  “Keep your mind on truth!” Honor commanded. The Wilkins plane quickly stabilized. “What happens if our bodies are destroyed?” he asked weakly.

  “We lose our field of attraction,” Honor replied. “We would then be resolved into error.”

  “You mean we’d have to stay here?” Dorothy gasped.

  Honor ignored the question. His mind was busy on other matters. “We are hovering,” he announced suddenly, “. . . suspended . . . in something or other. Let’s try to objectify perceptions. Maybe we can get the lie of the land.”

  “Can we resolve this thing mathematically, Pat?” Clinton asked.

  “I think so,” Honor mused. “We are in a mirror- image causal field, of that much I’m certain. Let’s concentrate on that idea, geometrically, and try to objectify something.”

  “He means, try to see where we are,” Barbara explained to Wilkins.

  “I don’t know how to . . .”

  “Enter my root center, then, and follow my lead. That’s it. There. Now, amplify in a geometric progression. No . . . not one, two, three, four . . .go two, four, eight, sixteen . .. that’s it.”

  A moment later, Clinton exclaimed, “Well I’ll be damned. We’re swirling with history!”

  “Yes, I see it,” Dorothy murmured.

  “Frightening!” from Wilkins.

  The five displaced “angels in hell” were at the center of a giant pinwheel. It looked, Honor thought, like the pictures he had seen of spiral galaxies, except that there was a wave motion of rapidly advancing and receding rings of “images.” In the nearest rings were vibrating the human atrocities of the 20th century . . . a silent yet hideously realistic re-enactment of the World Wars turning slowly upon weeping women, grim-faced men, and emaciated children. Hitler’s ovens were there, still burning, still ingesting millions of gaunt-eyed human wrecks. The atomic cloud still rose above Hiroshima, and one thin layer below, Pearl Harbor was being rocked by Japanese bombs. At the other side of the ring, men were storming ashore at Normandy while, just below that, Paris prostitutes continued to trade their bodies for German favors.

  Honor forced his eyes away from the grim storehouse of recent memory and lifted his gaze to the more- distant rings. Out there, distant but still vigorously active lay the horrors of the centuries. Christians continued to bum, the holy wars remained undiminished by time and, in the barely discernible fringes of the “galaxy,” man-like creatures slew each other with stones while others lurked in caves piled high with bones.

  “Now I know the meaning of eternity,” Jack Wilkins said in awed tones.

  The “galactic hub”, in which drifted the alien pentagon, seemed to be void. Honor knew better; it was not a void. “This is great,” he muttered. “We’re very near the barrel, unless my orientation is completely distorted.”

  “What’s so great?” Wilkins said. “This is hell and we’re in it. Look at that! Poor souls as far as the eye can see. Living their agonies over and over again, eternally. This is—”

  “You’re wrong,” Honor said flatly. “Those are not souls. They’re memories, no more, no less. We’re in the hub, see. Look around you. See the trailing edge of that first ring over there? Look at it closely. Follow it around the complete circle and keep a careful watch. There! See that?”

  Wilkins gasped, “Why, yes! There’s last week’s riot at Columbia! And look at that one! The killing of the policeman in Harlem! Three days ago! That happened just three days ago, Honor!”

  “We’re in the assimilation chamber,” Honor replied, grim-lipped.

  “In the what?” Clinton asked.

  “It’s an inductance field. This is where thoughts become things. We’re being assimilated at this very moment. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “How can we be assimilated?” Barbara commented. “We’re not thoughts . . . are we?”

  “I’m afraid that’s most of what we are,” Honor murmured. “I believe we’re safe as long as we can hold this form. But we can’t hold it forever, and certainly not after our earth-fields are destroyed.”

  “What’s the significance of all this, Honor?” Wilkins asked. “I mean, why? Why a universe filled with nothing but grotesque dreams?”

  “You can’t call those dreams, sir,” Honor replied. “They are the net residue of the evolution of man. We’re in the Rogue’s mind, haven’t you understood that? Look at it, all of you. Look and remember. Here is the enemy, the God which mankind’s errors have made.”

  “It really is the collective unconscious,” Wilkins said.

  “More ... it is the Universal Subconscious,” Honor told him. “Only now with a—well dammit, Milt, do you see it?” he finished excitedly.

  “See what?”

  “The secret, the way. Oh-ho, the Rogue God goofed, he screwed up good, he shouldn’t have allowed us in here. I know now, Milt. I understand the Rogue.”

  “What? What is it?” Barbara cried happily.

  “I think I know how to get us out of here, too. Listen carefully, now, all of you, we have to play this to close numbers, we haven’t a moment to lose. That bastard Singh! Your baby-faced buddy is in for a rude surprise, Barb.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Never mind, now. Later. Right now here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to blast our way out of here, straight down the gun barrel. We do not swirl, we ream it. Form on me, and geometrize. I’m on the point, a square-nine at the first power. Milt, you next, and on the next power. Then Dotty, Jack, and Barb at the rear, each at progressive powers.”

  “I don’t understand,” Wilkins protested.

  “I’m speaking of mental expansion, sir. You’ll catch it quick. Okay, here we go. Now stay close, allow no separation, and if I change values everybody change progressively and immediately. Okay? This may hurt a little. You with us, sir?”

  “Yes, I have it now.”

  “All right. Here we go, down, not up. Stay together! Let’s go!”

  The pentagon broke apart. A small point formed at its center and quickly took the form of an inverted pyramid, then seemed to explode into pyramiding dimensions and began falling through the four-dimensional space of the galactic hub. Rapidly picking up speed, it hurtled into the geometric center of the mental universe, slowed momentarily, then exploding again to double in size and velocity.

  “We’re in the barrel!” Honor announced exultantly. “Hang in close now, the real test is just ahead!”

  Barbara, required to constantly check and reinforce Wilkins’ projection, was beginning to tire and grow faint. “You’d better hurry,” she cried, “my comers are fraying.”

  “Hang on, we’re al
most through. Get set for a shock!”

  “Things” were tumbling past Barbara’s awareness, reaching out for her, tearing at her, trying to dislodge her from Jack Wilkins. She clung grimly in a final, supreme effort. Then came a jolt, a bright flash, a tearing pain, and she was fighting for her life. A heavy body was lying atop her, she was choking, and an intense heat was searing her flesh. She struggled to roll the President’s body aside, rising to an elbow and trying to peer through the dense, choking smoke. “Pat!” she cried. “Pat, where are you?”

  The door to the State Bedroom was kicked open. She caught a glimpse of Dorothy Clinton lying on the floor just outside as Pat and Milt ran into the room. “Get the President,” she heard Pat snap. “I’ll take care of Barbara.” And then she passed out.

  5: The Recruits

  The night of June 15-16 was to be remembered around the world and for many years to come. News of damage to the White House, “by a fire of undetermined origin,” was eclipsed by more traumatic world developments. More than a dozen large jetliners, of various countries, fell from the skies. An orbiting weather station disappeared, leaving no clues to its fate. The cities of Denver, Copenhagen, and Marseilles experienced complete power blackouts. The New England States of America and the Province of Quebec reported a strange 7-minute interruption of normal late-hours television programming, with all channels carrying a “weird film” of some ancient war throughout that period. Wire service dispatches from Oklahoma and Texas told of “mass hysteria” in those areas, prompted by a line of severe tornadoes “with horribly ugly faces frowning from the funnels.” Landslides in California and Turkey, severe electrical disturbances throughout Europe, numerous hurricanes in the Atlantic and Caribbean, stampeding animals and human eruptions in Africa, severe storms and flash floods in Asia—all these contributed to the scene of worldwide chaos and horror.